Copyrighteous

I have an intense, unexplainable, uneasiness around lamp stores. Perhaps it's even a fear.

Something about so many lamps, so close together. It seems unnatural. Very Wrong.

Due to the fact that my favorite Window manager is now licensed non-freely (and then some), I award Tuomo Valkonen the Jörg Schilling award for free software project management.

Tuomo can console himself with his award while I console myself with Tritium. With the new dock feature announced today, I think it just turned into something I can switch to.

Inspired by Mitchell Charity's printable paper rulers and Steve Pomeroy's CSS ruler, I wrote a little python script to generate an on-screen ruler for the OLPC XO-1. The XO-1 screens are super high resolution (200dpi) and are each identical. This makes for a very accurate ruler. It's one of a few project I've done or am working on that tries to take advantage of the physical qualities (and physical consistencies) of the XOs. Also, a ruler is just a really useful thing for a school child -- or anyone else for that matter.

Of course, different screens have different pixel sizes so the ruler for the XO won't work on another screen. This made some of my friends jealous. To appease them, I spent a couple hours and hacked up a little web frontend to my ruler generator which allows anyone to create custom on-screen rulers and to save them and share them with others who might have the same screen. I've called it YouRule. Please check it out or download the source and send me improvements.

http://projects.mako.cc/yourule

This Saturday, September 15, is Software Freedom Day 2007. With more than 300 teams registered, there's a good chance that there's something going on near you.

I'll be helping at the Software Freedom Day event in downtown Boston where I'll be giving a talk on a still undetermined topic. I'll also be helping out with GNU/Linux and RockBox installs and letting folks play with my XO and OpenMoko.

If you are into free software, open source, or GNU/Linux, please show up to your local SFD event. Go ahead and bring your friends who are not yet familiar with free software -- this event is primarily for them.

In Boston, there will be refreshments, talks, demonstrations, and installs. Bring your laptop, desktop, iPod, or other DAP -- or just bring yourself and a friend.

Perhaps you want to both reflect on 9/11 and help demonstrate that limericks can be serious by writing some serious limericks about 9/11?

Several months ago, I announced that I'd received a grant from mtvU and Cisco to work on a cool voting technology research project called Selectricity. A project in quotidian democracy, Selectricity attempts to apply some of the best voting technology and election methods research towards every-day decision-making. It takes research I did at the MIT Media Lab and packages it into a real, useful, application.

I spent probably half of my time over the last several months managing a team of competent hackers and designers as we've built out the project. Last week, press releases and news stories went out as we launched our first production batch of features and a new design. You can check it out online at:

http://selectricity.org

There is a whole line-up of a groups and organizations, some high profile, that will be using the software in the coming months. There's also half a dozen killer new features that are built and waiting in the wings for a little polish and fanfare. We'll be testing and releasing those in the next couple months.

No doubt, I'll be mentioning bits and pieces of my work on the project on my blog here. However, if you want to follow development, you should subscribe to the Selectricity News Blog where more full coverage will take place.

You can leave feedback, suggestions, and bugs as comments on the blog or email it to team@selectricity.org. The election method code is already published and we'll be releasing the rest of the code under the AGPLv3 when the license is released by the FSF in the next few weeks.

Last week, Raphaël Hertzog mentioned a transition in progress that was going to change the way that Planet Debian updates. As part of the plan to deprecate cvs.debian.org, Raphaël helped me move Planet Debian away from the old CVS repository and to a new Subversion repository in Alioth.

Readers of Planet Debian should not notice any differences.

When it comes time to change or disable a feed, contributors to planet Debian will have to update their feed slightly differently. Documentation on how the new method is now in the wiki and at gluck:/org/planet.debian.org/README.

As Raphaël mentioned, all Debian Developers have write access to the configuration file in the Subversion repository through their Alioth accounts. Unlike the old setup, non-DD's who have blogs in Planet can have write access to it as well, but they'll need to have an Alioth account and they'll need to be added to the ACL by me. As before, it's only OK to modify one's one feed and anyone who violates this in bad faith will have their privileges to the repository removed.

The old CVS repository remains crudely broken. Please help update any references to the old CVS-based method or alert me to documentation that's public and out of date that you don't have access to change yourself.